Hi! I just installed the latest LMDE yesterday. I was using Mint 11 before. My computer is connected to a A/V surround reciever via HDMI. I took some playing around to get sound through HDMI by default which i achive by changing the contents of the asound.conf file to:

My problem is getting AC3 passthrough to work. I had it working in Mint 11 where I got dolby digital surround using vlc player by selecting alsa (with hdmi) and spdif in the sound prefereces. Now I get nothing!! I did get surround also working in mint 11 with gnome mplayer and smplayer using the same method as for vlc. I do have liba52 installed. I unistalled pulseaudio as I did before with mint 11 to get it to work. Im using the same hardware as with mint 11.

I reinstalled pulseaudio to try and see if i can get it working with that. I read that pulseaudio has matured over the years and its better if I can get it to work with it. I have gotten the HDMI sound to work with pulseaudio. I have 4 HDMI subdevices (aplay -l) and the only one working was 1,7. But pulseaudio was not loading the correct one. So what I did was in /etc/pulse/default.pa comment out:"load-module module-udev-detect” with a # and add in its place "load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:1,7"

then,

killall pulseaudiosudo alsa reload

So now the HDMI sound works as default on everything. But I still havnt gotten the ac3 passthrough to work :/I did try to change the asound.conf file to:

ok a big breakthrough, I get ac3 passthrough with Dolby when i use mplayer:

mplayer -ao alsa:device=hw=1.7 -ac hwdts,hwac3 movie.avi

so its definately working. But I cant seem to figure out how to get it to work with the GUI players (vlc, GNOME Mplayer, SMplayer) and if i run the smplayer in terminal with the same options it just crashes.

In /etc/pulse/default.pa instead of comment out:"load-module module-udev-detect” with a # and add in its place "load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:1,7"I left "load-module module-udev-detect" as it is and just added "load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:1,7"cos without the "load-module module-udev-detect" I didnt get other devices loaded (wireless headphone etc. And I use 1,7 cos HDMI 1,7 worked for me when I tested with aplay but that may be different for someone else.

then....

killall pulseaudiosudo alsa reload

and that added an extra HD option in pulse volume control that I could choose and gave me sound over HDMI.

and then I get ac3 passthrough but at this stage only with mplayer in terminal with:

mplayer -ao alsa:device=hw=1.7 -ac hwdts,hwac3 movie.avi

so it is sort of solved now, except I would like to be able to use it without the command line in vlc for example. But I did add those options in /etc/mplayer.conf so now I can just type mplayer movie.avi

So the final problem is to get this working with other players (preferably vlc or smplayer) with point and click.

I'm not sure if this is relevent but usually when I have a sound problem with passthrough I startup gnome-alsa-mixer and check or uncheck the iec958 boxes. Most of the time this fixes the problem. As I seem to find that most versions of linux do not like to go between dolby prologic and dts easily.

I notice that sometimes pulseaudio doesnt load! and i cant load it manually with pulsaudio --start and there is no volume icon in the taskbar! When that happines its because the nvidia soundcard doesnt load as card 1 (aplay -l) but as card 2! And lately it has been mostly loading as card 2. So I have to change the mplayer config file and the module loaded in default.pa from 1,7 to 2,7:

load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:2,7

this is a bit annoying that it doesnt number the soundcard consistently between boots!

spottyrover wrote:I'm not sure if this is relevent but usually when I have a sound problem with passthrough I startup gnome-alsa-mixer and check or uncheck the iec958 boxes. Most of the time this fixes the problem.

This is exactly what solved it for me, installed it check the tickbox and I now have sound via HDMI.

#!/usr/bin/pulseaudio -nF## This file is part of PulseAudio.## PulseAudio is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it# under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by# the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or# (at your option) any later version.## PulseAudio is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but# WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU# General Public License for more details.## You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License# along with PulseAudio; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation,# Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA.

# This startup script is used only if PulseAudio is started per-user# (i.e. not in system mode)

### Network access (may be configured with paprefs, so leave this commented### here if you plan to use paprefs)#load-module module-esound-protocol-tcp#load-module module-native-protocol-tcp#load-module module-zeroconf-publish

### Load additional modules from GConf settings. This can be configured with the paprefs tool.### Please keep in mind that the modules configured by paprefs might conflict with manually### loaded modules..ifexists module-gconf.so.nofailload-module module-gconf.fail.endif

### Automatically restore the default sink/source when changed by the user### during runtime### NOTE: This should be loaded as early as possible so that subsequent modules### that look up the default sink/source get the right valueload-module module-default-device-restore

### Automatically move streams to the default sink if the sink they are### connected to dies, similar for sourcesload-module module-rescue-streams

### Make sure we always have a sink around, even if it is a null sink.load-module module-always-sink

### If autoexit on idle is enabled we want to make sure we only quit### when no local session needs us anymore..ifexists module-console-kit.soload-module module-console-kit.endif.ifexists module-systemd-login.soload-module module-systemd-login.endif

### Modules to allow autoloading of filters (such as echo cancellation)### on demand. module-filter-heuristics tries to determine what filters### make sense, and module-filter-apply does the heavy-lifting of### loading modules and rerouting streams.load-module module-filter-heuristicsload-module module-filter-apply

# This file is part of PulseAudio.## PulseAudio is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify# it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as# published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the# License, or (at your option) any later version.## PulseAudio is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but# WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU# General Public License for more details.## You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License# along with PulseAudio; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation,# Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA.

; This is a profile for Nvidia and Intel cards - some cards have four HDMI codecs,; and which ones are working seems to vary a lot between GPU boards. In addition,; Nvidia and Intel make southbridges as well, so we need to keep the existing; analog profiles.; (And by not adding all these extra profiles to default.conf, we make sure; there is no performance hit for non-Nvidia/Intel cards.)

3. I added enable-lfe-remixing = yes to daemon.conf in /etc/pulse to enable subwoofer

If I need to see DTS on my receiver panel (DTS pass-through) I have to shut all application which uses pulseaudiomeans firefox with flashplayer, Pulse Audio Volume Control, Clementine ... and thenfor example in SMplayer choose AC3, DTS passthrough and ALSA (0.7 - HDA Nvidia)If any pulse audio application is running even if pacmd list-sink-inputs is empty pass-throuh is not possible

It works in XBMC Frodo too, but it is needed to pause movie for a while to get rid off video tearing

So for me it is definitive solution, pulse audio allows other application to use ALSA In my opinion it should be said FINALLY